While these terms are useful in informal discussions

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Unformatted text preview: on-going risk
issues and future uncertainties. As such, it is a natural
part of concurrent engineering. The RMP should be
updated throughout the project life cycle.
4.6.1 Types of Risks There are several ways to describe the various
types of risk a project manager/system engineer faces.
Traditionally, project managers and system engineers
have attempted to divide risks into three or four broad
categories — namely, cost, schedule, technical, and,
sometimes, safety (and/or hazard) risks. More recently,
others have entered the lexicon, including the categories
of
organizational,
management,
acquisition,
supportability, political, and programmatic risks. These
newer categories reflect NASA Systems Engineering Handbook
Management Issues in Systems Engineering
the expanded set of concerns of project managers and
system engineers who must operate in the current
NASA environment. Some of these newer categories
also represent supersets of other categories. For
example, the Defense Systems Management College
(DSMC) Systems Engineering Management Guide
wraps &quot;funding, schedule, contract relations, and
political risks&quot; into the broader category of programmatic
risks. While these terms are useful in informal
discussions, there appears to be no formal taxonomy
free of ambiguities. One reason, mentioned above, is
that often one type of risk can be exchanged for
another. A second reason is that some of these
categories move together, as for example, cost risk and
political risk (e.g., the risk of project cancellation).
Another way some have categorized risk is by
the degree of mathematical predictability in its
underlying uncertainty. The distinction has been made
between an uncertainty that has a known probability
distribution, with known or estimated parameters, and
one in which the underlying probability distribution is
either not known, or its parameters cannot be objectively
quantified.
An example of the first kind of uncertainty
occurs in the unpredictability of the spares upmass
requirement for alternative Space Station Alpha
designs. While the requirement is stochastic in any
particular logistics c...
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